Posts Tagged ‘cs5’

[Editor’s note: I’ve been using CS5 for a while now and I think you’ll like it as much as I do. This release is focused on making existing work flows easier, faster, and more enjoyable. Check out the official promo at Adobe. Mordy has a great screencast showing off some of these features, as well.]

Joining lines

Freehand-style line joining! No longer required to select endpoints of two line, it just works with 2 or more lines selected. Did I mention it works on more than 2 lines at once? Super smart, huge time saver.

Caveat: if you are looking for very complicated GIS-style (angle, gap, etc) line joining, you’ll still need to use an advanced plugin. This one will work 90% of the time.

Select behind

Like Freehand and InDesign

Quibble: Doesn’t work on strokes, only on fill

Symbols

Now can have layers! This will allow us to work around many long standing sublayer bugs.

Can have masks and not selectable beyond the mask (if content is not visible, it is not selectable)

Bounding box no longer includes guides

Selection based on content, not bounding box

Actually use the registration point

Can transform symbols with respect to the registration point.

9-slice scaling now works, have guides for them (important for preserving the shape of corners when scaled)

Breaking link to symbol preserves symbol sublayers

Can align the symbol content to the pixel grid (for pretty web output)

Quibble: Before you could register via the bounding box (using preview bounds). Now you can’t. Instead, set a key object and then use 0 as the offset and use the distribute space button.

[Editor’s note: No, there is no Flash player on the iPhone or the new iPad in Safari. But, just like AIR on the desktop, Adobe has figured out a way to wrap Flash SWFs in an app runtime so they’ll work on the new devices. Apparently part of Flash CS5, Packager for iPhone, announced at MAX 2009 conference, will be interesting to watch (or multi-touch).]

Today Apple announced the Apple iPad and like many of you, we at Adobe are looking forward to getting our hands on one of these devices. This is an exciting time to be a software designer with an explosion of new devices and we look forward to helping Flash developers and designers bring innovative applications to these devices using our tools and frameworks.

We announced the Packager for iPhone at MAX 2009 which will allow Flash developers to create native iPhone applications and will be available in the upcoming version of Flash Pro CS5. This technology enables developers to create applications for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad (though applications will not initially take direct advantage of iPad’s new screen resolution). It is our intent to make it possible for Flash developers to build applications that can take advantage of the increased screen size and resolution of the iPad.

[Editor's note: I've known about the FXG format for exchanging content between Illustrator and Flash via Flash Catalyst for a while now but have never been excited about it until seeing this video from Adobe's MAX Sneaks session last week. It previews how FXG might one day (CS5?) allow live data binding (read automatically updating charting, etc) based on a design mocked up in Illustrator but deployed via Dreamweaver as HTML 5 (and iPhone compatible) or Flash via SWF.]

So take a look at this video that someone captured from this year’s Adobe MAX Sneaks session — a demo of technology showing integration between Illustrator and Dreamweaver. If it isn’t clear in the video clip below what is happening, I’ll spell it out for you: He starts by taking art drawn in Illustrator and copies it to the clipboard. Then he goes into Dreamweaver, selects a DIV and chooses a function called Smart Paste. Dreamweaver then pastes an FXG conversion of the Illustrator art directly into the page. If you aren’t familiar with FXG, it’s basically a better SVG (you can get more information on the open source FXG spec here). In other words, you draw in Illustrator, copy and paste into Dreamweaver (which converts it to code), and the art displays as vector art in a web browser. What’s more, the engineer proceed to actually bind XML data to the chart.

As I mentioned, I think this is probably something that is way way off in the future, but it’s still quite incredible. Maybe there’s some hope for us all, after all